Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

The Bronze Age civilization of the Indus Valley collapsed sometime around 1600 BC; it would be about a thousand years before India saw the emergence of another urban civilization. When it did, that civilization was centered on the fertile plains that surrounded the Ganges farther east. Here too we observe, at first, a checkerboard of different sorts of government, from the famous “Ksatriya republics” with a populace in arms and urban democratic assemblies, to elective monarchies, to centralized empires like Kosala and Magadha.32 Both Gautama (the future Buddha) and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism) were born in one of these republics, though both ultimately found themselves teaching within the great empires, whose rulers often became patrons of wandering ascetics and philosophers. Both kingdoms and republics produced their own silver and copper coinage, but in some ways the republics were more traditional, since the self-governing “populace in arms” consisted of the traditional Ksatriya or warrior caste, who typically held their lands in common and had them worked by serfs or slaves.33 The kingdoms, on the other hand, were founded on a fundamentally new institution: a trained, professional army, open to young men of a wide variety of backgrounds, their equipment supplied by central authorities (soldiers were obliged to check their arms and armor when they entered cities), and provided with generous salaries. Whatever their origins, here too, coins and markets sprung up abo...